1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to logging data automation for Virtual Tape Server (VTS) applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known for system applications to level their logging data to balance various resources consumptions such as system outage cost, labor cost, etc. Typically an application is designed to handle staged logging levels, such as production level, testing level, debug level, development level, etc, and users can turn on/off different logging levels at run-time in order to satisfy their particular interests from debugging applications' hardware or software errors, monitoring systems' performance at various I/O states, analyzing system's execution statistics at various stages, etc.
For a production system, if an application processes too much logging data, the processing can affect system resources, such as performance, memory, storage, etc. However, if an application processes too little logging data, it is often difficult for system support structure to understand a system failure when such an error occurs. In turn, more labor might be required to resolve the problem, or the system may experience much longer outages. Additionally, because an occurrence of an error is mostly unpredictable, having an application process excessive logging data, unconditionally, during periods of stability for the production system can be unfair.
Accordingly, often only minimized logging data is processed to monitor a system's important run-time status. In other words, production level of logging data is turned on for an application in a production system. When an error occurs, and the production level of data cannot provide a satisfactory resolution, then a higher logging level (i.e., debug level) turns on to catch more data that are detailed when the same error occurs again. This can be a timely and costly process, and can cause multiple system outages.
Thus, an optimal logging level management is desirable from the perspective of system's overall resource management.